Gdje sam? Skip Navigation Links Vijesti i arhiva

Novosti News

31.1.2022. 7:56
projekt Hearth
 
What happened to Israel’s Holocaust restitution program?

Shurat Hadin is working to restart the HEART project that gave hope to hundreds of thousands of Holocaust-scarred families.
By MICHAEL STARR

Published: JANUARY 27, 2022



“The Holocaust was not only the greatest murder ever committed, but the greatest robbery in history,” said NatanSharansky, former chairman of the Jewish Agency, at a 2011 news conference for the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Task Force, or Project HEART.

HEART was to serve as a witness of that systematic pillaging of Jewish communities. The objective was to collect documents and testimonies of property seized from Jews, and create a database to become a tool for restitution and historical research.

The project gave hope to hundreds of thousands of families, but that hope was dashed when the project was abruptly closed in 2014. Many Holocaust survivors weren’t told of the closure. Some believe that HEART is still working on their behalf.

On Monday, Shurat Hadin, a legal and civil rights NGO, filed an appeal to the Justice Ministry and the Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services Ministry for the release of HEART’s database, with the intent to pick up where the project left off and get long-denied restitution for survivors. It may be the last opportunity.

HEART was the brainchild of Rafi Eitan, the Israeli politician and former intelligence officer. According to Shurat Hadin, after Eitan’s Pensioner’s Party failed to meet the electoral threshold in 2009, and he was denied a promised ministerial position, Eitan asked instead to head a new Holocaust restitution program. Eitan recruited Bobby Brown to be HEART’s director.

“Until that point, all of the efforts to retrieve Jewish properties from the Holocaust were done by top-down method,” said Brown. “They would negotiate [with governments] and then they would look if there are any Holocaust survivors that qualified.” Brown and Eitan worked to create a “bottom-up” approach in which the demands of Holocaust victims would be collected, and then presented to relevant bodies.

The task force allied with 12,000 Jewish communities. The process wasn’t easy, but for Brown and his team of 60 local volunteers and almost 2,000 global volunteers, it was a “labor of love.”

After three years, HEART had collected more than 200,000 claims of properties, insurance policies, businesses, investments and more. The resulting databases included about “two million properties that were stolen or looted during the Holocaust,” said AnyaVerkhovskaya, administrative director for the project working at AV Data:

 “Which is the largest archive ever, and survivors and their heirs could search that archive in any language to look for their relatives.” The system even had a special “algorithm to pull names that would be spelled in a similar way.”

In addition to being a tool for claims, Brown said that they “looked at this as part of Holocaust history that had never been documented. We began working, going to various companies, beginning the process of getting restitution with a moderate degree of success in the beginning. And then we were closed down.”

Prijevod 

Što se dogodilo s izraelskim programom restitucije holokausta?
Shurat Hadin radi na ponovnom pokretanju projekta HEART koji je dao nadu stotinama tisuća obitelji pogođenih holokaustom.

Autor MICHAEL STARR , Objavljeno: 27. SIJEČNJA 2022 

“Holokaust nije bio samo najveće ubojstvo ikada počinjeno, već najveća pljačka u povijesti”, rekao je Natan Sharansky, bivši predsjednik Židovske agencije, na tiskovnoj konferenciji 2011. za Radnu skupinu za povrat imovine iz razdoblja Holokausta ili Projekt  HEART  SRCE.

HEART je trebao poslužiti kao svjedok tog sustavnog pljačkanja židovskih zajednica. Cilj je bio prikupiti dokumente i svjedočanstva o imovini oduzetoj od Židova, te stvoriti bazu podataka koja bi postala alat za restituciju i povijesno istraživanje.

Projekt je dao nadu stotinama tisuća obitelji, ali ta je nada srušena kada je projekt naglo zatvoren 2014. Mnogim preživjelima holokausta nije rečeno o zatvaranju. Neki vjeruju da SRCE još uvijek radi u njihovo ime.

Šurat Hadin, nevladina udruga za pravna i građanska prava, podnijela je u ponedjeljak apel Ministarstvu pravosuđa i rada, socijalnih pitanja i socijalnih službi za objavljivanje baze podataka HEART-a, s namjerom da nastavi gdje je projekt stao i da se nastavi dugo uskraćena restitucija za preživjele Holokausta. Možda je to posljednja prilika.

HEART je bio  zamisao Rafija Eitana, izraelskog političara   Prema Shuratu Hadinu,  Eitan je  zatražio da vodi za novi program restitucije Holokausta. Eitan je angažirao Bobbyja Browna za redatelja HEART-a.  "Do tog trenutka, svi napori da se povrati židovska imovina od holokausta obavljali su se metodom odozgo prema dolje", rekao je Brown. "Oni bi pregovarali [s vladama], a zatim bi provjerili ima li preživjelih od holokausta koji su kvalificirani." Brown i Eitan radili su na stvaranju pristupa “odozdo prema gore” u kojem bi se prikupljali zahtjevi žrtava holokausta, a zatim bi se prezentirali relevantnim tijelima.

Radna skupina udružila se s 12 000 židovskih zajednica. Proces nije bio lak, ali za Browna i njegov tim od 60 lokalnih volontera i gotovo 2000 globalnih volontera to je bio “rad ljubavi”.

Nakon tri godine, HEART je prikupio više od 200.000 potraživanja za nekretnine, police osiguranja, poduzeća, ulaganja i još mnogo toga. Rezultirajuće baze podataka uključivale su oko “dva milijuna nekretnina koje su ukradene ili opljačkane tijekom holokausta”, rekla je Anya Verkhovskaya, administrativna direktorica projekta koji radi u AV Data. "Koji je najveći arhiv, a preživjeli i njihovi nasljednici mogli su pretraživati taj arhiv, na bilo kojem jeziku , kako bi potražili svoje rođake." Sustav je čak imao poseban "algoritam za povlačenje imena koja bi se pisali na sličan način".

 Brown je rekao da su “na ovo gledali kao na dio povijesti holokausta koja nikada nije dokumentirana. Počeli smo raditi, odlazili u razne tvrtke, započeli proces povrata s umjerenim uspjehom u početku. A onda su nas zatvorili.”